Halo: Campaign Evolved PC Settings Guide

Halo: Combat Evolved sits in a pantheon alongside some of the best games ever made, so it wasn’t surprising that Microsoft would release a second remake of it eventually. However, instead of using a bespoke, in-house engine, this time around Halo Studios opted for Unreal 5,. And while that’s awesome for anyone with a high-end machine, it does mean it struggles to scale to lower-end and older hardware.

That doesn’t mean the game doesn’t look good though. If you have the hardware to juice up the settings a bit, Halo: Campaign Evolved looks stunning, with excellent lighting and environmental detail. But unlike a lot of games that have come out this year, like Resident Evil Requiem and Crimson Desert, which are on much more flexible engines, the Halo remake isn’t well-optimized for lower-end hardware and turns into an ugly mess once you need to start turning down some of the settings.

Ever since its debut back in 2022, Unreal 5 has had a bit of a reputation for being quite heavy on graphics cards. And while Halo: Campaign Evolved does fare a bit better than something like Silent Hill F or, well, the Silent Hill 2 remake, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room to tweak performance, at least in my testing of the game.

I’ve already talked about how bad Halo: Combat Evolved looks on the weakest handhelds, but there generally isn’t much room to tweak without making massive swings. You often have to change multiple settings to see any kind of performance improvement, to the point where you’re probably better off just going to the next preset if you’re looking to boost performance or fidelity.

So, for most people, the best move is to just look at this handy little chart and align the preset with which graphics card you have and how much VRAM you have. For instance, I plugged in the RTX 3090 as a stand-in for the recommended RTX 3080 Ti, which the chart says should run at 60 fps at 4K with the High preset. And, well, that’s exactly how the 3090 performed. But what’s interesting is that the performance didn’t really move all that much when I started tweaking with the settings.

In my heart of hearts, I love it when a PC game encourages me to tweak with the settings to really dial in the performance. Halo: Campaign Evolved just doesn’t seem to be that game. But while that’s a bit of a disappointment for me, I don’t think it's necessarily a bad thing. There’s something about quickly picking the right preset and getting into the game that’s really appealing, and in a way feels true to Halo’s console roots.

If you do want to eke out a bit more performance, though, I’ve scoured through all the different settings to figure out what they change, and which ones you should change first if you want to improve performance or image quality.

Effects Quality: Effects Quality changes how complex visual effects like explosions are. In a game like Halo, where there are all kinds of different explosions and lasers being shot everywhere all the time, this is something I’d avoid turning down unless you really need to save performance. Don’t just turn it down if your average fps is lower than you want, though, only turn it down if your frame rate seriously drops during combat.

• Mid-range PC: High
• Handheld: Very Low

Geometric Quality: In a lot of games, this would affect little objects like rocks in the environment, but in the Halo remake, the developers shoved all geometry under this one setting. So, this now affects silly little rocks, as well as how complex character models are. I’d keep this as high as possible until you start running out of VRAM.

• Mid-range PC: High
• Handheld: Very Low

Global Illumination Quality: For some reason, Halo Studios kept all the geometry effects under one setting, but broke global illumination out of the overarching lighting category. Because this only affects indirect lighting, it doesn’t change performance all that much when you turn it down, so I’d keep it turned up.

• Mid-range PC: High
• Handheld: Very Low

Lighting Quality: Just like geometric quality, Halo Studios shoved shadows, lighting quality and light draw distance into one setting here. So, changing this setting will make big changes to your performance, but at the cost of turning down most of the lighting effects at the same time. Ideally, all three of these things would have their own settings, but this would be the first thing to turn down if you’re struggling to hit 60 fps.

• Mid-range PC: High, or Medium on a 60-class card
• Handheld: Very Low

Texture Quality: One of the reasons I don’t like presets is because they usually change textures to be either way below what your VRAM can handle, or way above. For instance, on the Radeon RX 9070 I tested the game with, Halo Studios recommends the high preset, but with 16GB of VRAM, the 9070 has more than enough budget to crank textures up to ultra. For this setting, I’d use the amount of VRAM to guide you.

• 12GB or more: Ultra
• 8GB-12GB: High
• 4GB-8GB: Medium
• Handheld: Low

Reflections: As a general rule of thumb, reflections are one of the most demanding effects in any modern game. Halo: Campaign Evolved is no different, and it helps that I don’t really like how they look in this game. This is something I’d feel comfortable turning down to medium or low to try and squeeze out a couple of extra frames.

• Mid-range PC: High or Medium
• Handheld: Very Low

Atmospheric Quality: This changes all the atmospheric effects like clouds, fog, or smoke. In a game like Halo, I don’t think atmospherics are that important, but your mileage will vary. If this was something like, say, Resident Evil or Metro, atmospherics would be much more important to the game’s aesthetic.

• Mid-range PC: High or Low
• Handheld: Very Low

Post-Processing Quality: This affects the quality of the various post-processing effects like bloom and god rays. You can turn this down, but it hardly impacts performance, so I’d just keep it turned up unless you’re really struggling for fps.

• Mid-range PC: High
• Handheld: Low

Screen Shake: This is a simple toggle to enable or disable the screen shaking when certain things happen in the game. This won’t affect performance, really, so turn it off if it’s annoying you.

• Mid-range PC: Your choice
• Handheld: Your choice

Motion Blur: Usually I’d say this is another optional setting, but the motion blur in this game is really bad. Maybe it’s just my eyes, but it’s particularly blurry in this game, making it hard to actually play the game. But, again, go with your personal preference.

• Mid-range PC: Your choice, but leaning to off
• Handheld: Off

Upscaling Technique: This will depend on which GPU you have. For AMD users, use FSR, for Nvidia users use DLSS and for Intel use XeSS. Just keep in mind that for some reason, the game won’t let you use XeSS if you got the game through the Microsoft Store or Game Pass.

Upscaling Quality: For some reason, Halo Studios abandoned the now-standard verbiage that pretty much every game uses for upscaling quality, instead opting for the same low-medium-high options as the rest of the graphics settings. Despite the different names, though, the actual tiers are still standard. Basically, Ultra is Quality Mode, Medium is Performance mode.

• Mid-Range PC: High (Balanced)
• Handheld: Medium (Performance)

Async Compute: From the way Halo Studios words this, it sounds like this option will allow your GPU to move some work, like physics, to some of the secondary chips in your graphics card. Keep this off unless you have a brand-new graphics card, a good CPU, or preferably, both.

Low Latency Mode: Just like with Upscaling Technique, the best option here will depend on which GPU you’re using. There is a default option that’s available for all graphics cards, but I’d recommend just going with Nvidia Reflex for Team Green and AMD Anti-Lag for Team Red.

Frame Generation: Love it or hate it, this uses AI to generate extra frames between each rendered frame. This improves your frame rate, but introduces some added latency. As a general rule of thumb, I’d only recommend turning this on if you’re already getting at least 40 fps. Otherwise, the game can turn into a glitchy, artifact-filled mess.



Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra